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    For every social force, Luthor thought, there is an equal and opposite social force to balance it. Maybe that was the Universal law he had in mind. Maybe it was that simple. In one of the hundreds of biographies of the man that Luthor read before he was old enough to balance an oxidation-reduction reaction, he found that Einstein would approach each new problem of physics the same way. Evidently the old man would sit back in his chair, close his eyes and ask himself how he would arrange the Universe if he were God. When Lex Luthor now asked himself the same question he came to the inevitable conclusion that his rule about the balancing of social forces was true. Everything is in or approaching a state of equilibrium. There is no good and bad, no right and wrong, no Heaven and Hell. There is not even any middle ground. There is just dead center.
    Therefore, Luthor had to do all he could to make life difficult for Superman. Not to do so was equivalent to trying to repeal Ohm's Law or Pauli's Exclusion Principle. It was Luthor's duty to the Balance of Nature.  
    Luthor now saw, with hindsight, that it was inevitable for his life to be bound up with that of the Kryptonian almost from the day Superboy began to exercise his power on Earth. The notice on page three of the four-page Smallville Times-Reader about the Luthor family taking title to the old house on Merriellees Lane was in the first issue in that publication's history in which the editor, Sarah Lang, chose to decorate page one with a banner headline. The headline read:  
    ARMY TO INVESTIGATE
SMALLVILLE ANGEL
    The so-called Smallville Angel was how the written press across the country accounted for a series of apparent miracles that were happening in Smallville with increasing frequency over the months immediately preceding Luthor's arrival there. Children in the process of drowning would suddenly find themselves waking up by the side of the lake; furious tornadoes would regularly unwind and sputter out on the edge of town; thieves cruising away from the scene of the crime would find themselves stopped short, surrounded by neat little jerry-built cages made of tree trunks or mud or whatever was handy—cages which vanished as immediately as they appeared when the police happened upon the scene; that sort of thing.
    Everyone in Smallville knew by this time that there was no angel. People had caught glimpses of the little boy in the red and blue flying suit for years. He would be in his early teens now, and the people of Smallville generally felt that it was time the outside world took notice of their Superboy. Everyone who walks the Sierras knows the day-to-day habits of the legendary sasquatch. Every New Englander who lives north of Manchester, New Hampshire, knows there is a lot of flying hardware in the sky from somewhere other than here. Every half of a pair of identical twins knows what telepathy feels like. No federal commission has to put a label of legitimacy on reality. It is always nice to think, though, that government officials have some concept of what reality in fact is.
    Superboy seemed to come to the conclusion that if the army wanted to see him, there was no reason he should go out of his way to hide himself. The week Jules and Arlene Luthor, their teenage son Lex and their infant daughter Lena moved into the house on Merriellees Lane, there appeared the second banner headline in the history of the Smallville Times-Reader :  
    SUPERBOY REVEALS HIMSELF
    and the three words filled the entire first page under the paper's logo. The special expanded issue was eight pages long, carried no advertising, was completely devoted to the subject of Superboy. There was a complete transcript, for example, of the dinner conversation at the White House where the President honored the young hero, but there was no room for the fact that a new family had moved into town.
    Luthor thought it was significant that the local weekly newspaper never did get around to